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holy_calamity writes "Technology Review has an update on a screen technology from Qualcomm called Mirasol that delivers LCD-like colors and video but sips power like e-ink. Demonstration Android tablets with 5.7 inch Mirasol displays apparently held up well in bright light and were responsive enough for gaming. Qualcomm are in the process of building a $1 billion new factory to make the screens, which should appear in devices from phone and tablet makers next year."

Between this and a couple of other low power passive displays working their way to market, one of them is going to succeed. And change everything.

The display is one of the biggest power hogs right now. The radios in cell phones are also pretty hungry but having an always on display will be game changing. Then when you consider the work on various memory techs that eliminate idle current and the lifetime issues with flash, things are going to continue to be very interesting in the tech world.

i have been waiting for a mirasol or pixi q tablet for 6 years when I first heard of the displays. I am tired of waiting and waiting and waiting. Just put out a decent device with the display and you will sell enough to pay for that building.

I have been waiting for a mirasol or pixi q tablet for 6 years when I first heard of the displays. I am tired of waiting and waiting and waiting. Just put out a decent device with the display and you will sell enough to pay for that building.

Is there something wrong with the Pixel Qi model of the Notion Ink Adam?

Is there something wrong with the Pixel Qi model of the Notion Ink Adam?

I've never seen them IRL. But I've been following them through youtube videos, and the problem with Pixel Qi is that under sunlight it only looks good for laptops, but not for tablets. The touchscreen technology requires a reflective glass layer that negates almost all the benefits of the Qi display.

Is it? Ever since Jobs got sick, basically since Leopard, which is really pretty decent, Apple's been producing poorer and poorer OSX and IOS releases. IOS5 has many, many problems, and also, apparently intentionally, inflicts a rather wicked planned obsolescence on Leopard users -- wifi sync doesn't work. And then there's the *way* they implemented wifi sync. Previously, you had to connect to your PC/mac, and it would sync via USB. Now (assu

since Leopard, which is really pretty decent, Apple's been producing poorer and poorer OSX and IOS releases

Really? Granted I didn't upgrade to "Lion" until 10.7.2, but I've never experienced a smoother OS upgrade, and I never upgrade to a 10.x.0 release. Basically my experience was that everything I cared about worked as well or better, with the exception single-app Exposé, which I rarely used anyway.

And while I won't dismiss reliance on 5+ year old software out of hand, anyone with a workflow where they can't or won't update that software should be researching new OS upgrades beforehand; and if that's your

You're quite right -- I did research my upgrades, and found that it would have been a very bad idea indeed to move beyond Leopard -- so I didn't. Nor do I plan to. Luckily, Leopard is on optical media, and is very amenable to Hackintoshery, so even if Apple drops the Mac Pro, when the time comes to upgrade my machine, I'm still going to be running Leopard on a heck of a nice machine. It just won't be an Apple. I'll either run Leopard native, or in a VM. Not worried about it at all. Been fixing some of the b

Indeed.. 30fps from a colour e-ink display. I can hardly imagine how strange it would be watching a video on one of these things.

This is the beginning of the end of printed magazines, now that people can't complain about eye strain from backlights. It will also be damn cool to be able to do real "living photos" without a backlit display.

Modifiable tattoos is another fun use that they're already doing with monochrome e-ink - being able to have them in colour that doesn't fade would be awesome too. The whole reason I haven't got a tattoo so far is that I know I'd probably want to change the design at some point.

The applications are indeed very far reaching... from having things that look like full motion paintings (think "Harry Potter"), to changing the pattern on the wallpaper in your house, to changing the colors of the clothes that you are wearing, all at a push of a button.

What is the point for you then? The point for me is first not having to have a shelf full of books, and second because I can carry around many books - even massive textbooks - in one small form factor. The page turn times really are fast enough for - probably about three quarters of a second at most on my Kindle keyboard, and maybe 0.1 of a second on my Android phone and tablet.

It's funny - now whenever I read a real book, I want to touch the words on the screen to do a dictionary check.. then realise that

>>What is the point for you then? The point for me is first not having to have a shelf full of books, and second because I can carry around many books - even massive textbooks - in one small form factor.

Sure, same selling point for me. But when a device pisses me off with glacial refresh or page turn times, it's just not very useful for me.

Try flipping on a e-ink Kindle one page at a time through a book, and then try it from inside of a non-eink tablet, and a PC. The difference is pretty damn noticeab

Well, I guess I must be too relaxed to care these days. The switch is obviously long enough to be noticeable, but I don't think the time is much different to turning a page - only there's less hassle because you are doing a tiny button click instead of moving a couple of fingers or a whole hand around. Either that or you have an earlier Kindle version than I have (bought mine in January).

I read my tablet at home, and my Kindle each day on the bus, so I have experience of both.

My comment in relation to it being strange was not about the FPS. It was about the fact that this is an e-ink (reflective) screen, rather than backlit. Even e-ink is novel to most people - we're definitely not used to ink that can animate quickly and in colour.

Yes No Maby.Thing is, as far as the content goes, it comes in 24 or 30fps rates, so as long as you can do those consistantly without variation, it will look fine.Gaming on the other hand, you'll need to add lots of motion blur to make it look acceptable. That being said, even at 120hz(I've got an aw2310 and no 3d glasses for a reason...), motion blur helps.But I'd not want to a 30fps screen for much in the way of transitions or scrolling, as it'd definitely be somewhat jerky.

You seem to have things mixed up. Some games these days have motion blur effects, but that's only a special effect, it's not to make things look "acceptable". If you freeze a TV frame in motion, you will see blurring. If you pause a computer game, you will always get a crisp clear image (unless like I said there's a special motion effect going on - like when you drive quickly in GTA IV for example).

You seem to have things mixed up. Some games these days have motion blur effects, but that's only a special effect, it's not to make things look "acceptable". If you freeze a TV frame in motion, you will see blurring. If you pause a computer game, you will always get a crisp clear image (unless like I said there's a special motion effect going on - like when you drive quickly in GTA IV for example).

Actually, the motion blur is there to make the series of images look acceptable when the frame rate drops, so you're both right (or both wrong, if you're the glass-half-empty type.) But they will certainly tell you it's all aesthetic.

Japanese movies are coming out at 30fps progressive, now that digital projection is commonplace.

Best practice with cinematography is that the camera should not be moved too fast, on account of the 24fps shutter making motion very staccato, and the faster things move, the more obvious the flickering becomes. some slow graceful pans can appear completely smo

We've been hearing about this technology for years now, and unfortunately it's taken it so long to get to market that I think they've missed their market window.

Smartphones and tablets, spurred on in large part by Apple, have entered into an arms race of display quality with consumer displays the likes has never been seen before. The sort of displays our mobile devices have make our computer monitors look shameful, with AMOLED pushing the boundaries in terms of true blacks and contrast ratios and viewing angles, and ever-higher resolutions pushing DPIs to the boundaries of human sight. Most LCD IPS displays, which are the cream of the crop for desktop monitors and better than any flat-screen TV, are really just average at best these days in the mobile world.

The Mirasol displays, at least the ones that have been demoed, have never been the highest quality displays. Their two huge advantages are daylight-readability and low power-consumption. Those are two very positive traits, but at this stage, I don't really foresee anything outside of a niche market giving up ordinary-circumstance display quality for these.

as an apple h8er, i'll concede that their screen is the best in the tablet market, but it's in no way accurate (especially when it's crusted with grease marks).

domestic LCD/LED/plasmas are all shit in this regard if left at factory settings, but at least when you calibrate them they can actually reproduce the whole gamut. the current crop of netbook and tablet displays can't do full saturation at all, meaning if you tweak a picture to look good on one, i'll look like a

On the contrary, I think this is an excellent time to bring out new technology on products that the market already wants. Every iteration of a smartphone or tablet needs to bring out something different, something new, in order for people to ditch perfectly functional gadgets and get their hit of the latest coolness. In the end, it all boils down to how well you do your sales pitch, but underlying it is the assumption that you actually have something new to sell.

No doubt, these things seem great for niche-markets. Color, motion-capable e-readers seem awesome.

I do hope that they find their niches, and get the funds to continue to improve the technology. Because if you could get the resolution/angles/contrast of modern mobile displays onto something like a Mirasol display that is low power and daylight-readable and low-eyestrain, obviously that would be the best case scenario.

Can you please provide reference to the other low power passive technologies you mentioned? I'd like to do some research on whats around the corner and it sounds like you already know who the front runners are. Thanks.

LOL. Hardware engineers can often make more than software engineers in the same company. What you are talking about is people that go off and make their own products that other people buy. That could be hardware or software. Consider the case of two guys named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak that built a company started out with a hardware product (and some software to drive it.)
It doesn't matter what your background is so long as you can come up with a decent product that people want. Hardware/software/literature/movie/clothing. Come up with a good product at a decent price and figure out how to market it and you too can make millions. T

It's a different time, back when they were building PCs in their garage it wasn't consumer electronics. Nowadays you can't hope to make a tablet, PC or whatever without getting some serious funding. The alternative is producing more expensive goods so you don't compete with massive factories in China for slim profits.

How does that compare with code produced by business or art school majors who want to try out being a programmer?

All EEs who aren't old enough to have been retired long ago have taken courses on logic design. Things like state machines or indirect addressing come naturally to them. Software is a natural evolution from circuit design.

Mechanical parts that are very small tend to be very robust. Look at the moving mirror technology in projectors (it's called DLP); those things seem to last forever, I've not heard about any of them losing pixels -- I've got a 1080p Optoma with about 9000 hours of lamp time, and the display looks as good as it did on day one when you slap a fresh bulb in it (the bulbs dim over time... but that doesn't mean the mirrors are implicated at all in the gradual reduction of quality.)

Wrong! You will need much less front light than back light to see things. You need back light ALL THE TIME. You only need front light WHEN IT IS DARK.
These devices will probably have away to produce some "side light" so you can read in the dark

You'd normally need a light to read a real book anyways, how is needing a light to read something on a different surface any different?

Maybe you like having tons of photons projected directly into your eyes, when your pupils are mostly dilated to accommodate reflect the total amount of light visible to you (which actually doesn't tend to average to much if the room is otherwise too dark to be able to read anything that isn't actually glowing, so your pupils are generally more dilated than they might need to be), but not everybody likes trying to read while staring into a flashlight.

Yes, of course... but to typically get it at a level that is suitable, you end up reducing contrast to below the level it would have otherwise appeared on a normal printed page, and given that the visual center of our brains depends heavily on contrast to identify shapes, one might as well just be trying to read a normal book in low light. While not actually being bad for your eyes directly, it's a pretty fast way to get a migraine.

How often do you hear the notion that self-illuminating displays cause eye-strain? (Actually "eye-strain" is most likely a misinterpretation of what is actually physiologically going on, but it's still descriptive enough to give a general idea of where the problem actually lies.)

While all you need is photons going into your eyes to *SEE*, you need actual contrast in order to visually perceive and recognize what it is that you are actually seeing (which is crucial for reading). Emissive displays can easily produce the necessary amount of contrast that makes reading easy to do, but when in room that is otherwise too dark to read in, it effectively amounts to trying to read while, as I said above, staring into a flashlight. While turning down the brightness on the display may help

Based on that video, it appears that the display is a 3 bit display, relying on the miniscule sizes and dithering to create intermediate tones. If the interface treats a hundred or so elements as one logical pixel that may work fine. Otherwise... well lets just say as a developer it suck to have to either predither for display, or to accept that different colors have different minimum widths necessary to display correctly.

Not dithering -- just cumulative addition. The more reflecting elements there are, the more color you get. So each pixel is a series of imod elements, arrays of R, G and B. Black is all off; dark color is just a few on... medium color is half of 'em on... bright color is all of 'em on.

Make it large enough to handle textbook content presented at a readable size (typically letter-sized pages), and I'd be all over it, as long as it allowed me to upload my own pdf's to it, and, perhaps no less important, as long as it wasn't priced ridiculously high. And yeah, I know there's some e-ink readers oout there with displays nearly that big, but the current state of affairs with eink displays totally blows. Page refreshes are so slow that I'd rather carry 20 lbs worth of textbooks than try to use an eink reader for anything other than the reading of fiction.

A 14" screen would be ideal... although with a respectable resolution, a 10-11" one might also be able to suffice.

Make it large enough to handle textbook content presented at a readable size (typically letter-sized pages), and I'd be all over it, as long as it allowed me to upload my own pdf's to it, and, perhaps no less important, as long as it wasn't priced ridiculously high. And yeah, I know there's some e-ink readers oout there with displays nearly that big, but the current state of affairs with eink displays totally blows. Page refreshes are so slow that I'd rather carry 20 lbs worth of textbooks than try to use an eink reader for anything other than the reading of fiction.

Actually, full letter size is generally far too large. Take a standrd hardback book, then pare down the margin space you no longer need (and which is to be replaced by screen bezel, not empty pixels), and you've got a very well established field-tested form factor to work with.

Better yet, get rid of the screen bezel and build a collapsible handle system into the back, so your hand can be behind it, yet still hold it securely. The bezel on my iPad strikes me as a complete waste of space. I might feel better about it if there had been a camera in my gen 1, but there isn't... the bezel just makes the thing so big I can quite get my hand around it without an uncomfortable stretch. We'll have a Kindle Fire in the house tomorrow, looking forward to reading on something that actually fi

The bezel could shrink - but only if your new screen tech consumes a lot less juice. The iPad's dimensions and weight are determined by the massive battery needed to get a 10 hour run time for the LCD, not mechanical constraints. (This is also why smaller tablets like the Fire only run for 6-8 hours.)

If bezel width were determined by mechanical reasons, the bezel wouldn't need to be any wider than an iPhone bezel...

I can't wait for this tech to get into tablets. Just a few of the advantages I'm expecting (and here's hoping there will be no disappointments)

1. I stare at an LCD screen all day, and I really detest the backlight. This is what prevents me from reading on a "tablet". Mirasol will fix that.
2. The Kindle's e-ink display, even though it didn't have colour, was simply amazing. However, the slow refresh rates combined with the lack of colour, made it too special purpose. Mirasol fixes all that, allowing for a general purpose tablet + e-reader and I can't imagine why that wouldn't succeed.
3. The paper like effect (which I assume Mirasol will have), will be so much easier on the eyes - meaning less eye strain. Given a choice between ruining my eye sight and enduring bad colour, I'll choose bad colour anytime.
4. We can go back to the look & feel of paper without the associated wastage (trees cut down etc. etc). One "electronic book" to substitute them all.
5. A battery life comparable in the kindle range instead of the lcd range would be an added bonus, but not a deal breaker.
6. Resolution however is important. I assume that high res screens will be available.
7. Some form of built-in illumination in the absence of ambient light.

I can't wait for this tech to get into tablets. Just a few of the advantages I'm expecting (and here's hoping there will be no disappointments)
...
3. The paper like effect (which I assume Mirasol will have), will be so much easier on the eyes - meaning less eye strain. Given a choice between ruining my eye sight and enduring bad colour, I'll choose bad colour anytime.
4. We can go back to the look & feel of paper without the associated wastage (trees cut down etc. etc). One "electronic book" to substitute them all.

I dunno, it's not so clear it will be "paper-like"...

e-paper uses a real matte reflective surface, like paper, but this mirasol stuff seems to be based on thin-film mirrors—i.e., not matte. Maybe they can do something with a diffusing layer over that, but who knows how much that will look like a real matte surface; it could look more like a material with significant sub-surface scatting, like wax...

The other thing of course, is that because mirasol uses separate wave-length-specific sub-pixels for red, green, and blue, the amount of light reflected is going to be cut down accordingly, as each sub-pixel will be absorbing many wavelengths even when in its "reflecting" state. So it may very well be kind of dim. [On an LCD, they can compensate for that by simply cranking up the backlight sufficiently to make up for any losses, but mirasol is supposed to work in ambient light...]

What does the article mean by e-ink like power consumption? I can't tell if this technology requires power to remain in a given state, or whether it can be static like e-ink. Although the low power consumption of e-ink displays is largely due to their lack of a backlight, being able to display static content with 0 power consumption is really one of the coolest parts about e-ink tech.

I read the article but it didn't seem to answer this, do any readers know? If it could display static content for free then that would be incredibly awesome.

This page explains near the end: http://www.mirasoldisplays.com/mobile-display-imod-technology [mirasoldisplays.com]It's bistable, so it retains memory of the image without needing power (or only a little power), which is similar to e-ink.But it switches much faster than e-ink, so it can do video, presumably consuming power for the regions which change.

First, the cavities have just two reflecting surfaces. The interference design may work wonders on butterfly wings, but they have many reflective layers, not just two. With just two, the wavelength specificity of the reflected light will be poor: you won't be able to make a bright green spot, merely a greenish spot.

Second, each subpixel can reflect only a particular colour (presumably they'll go for red, green and blue subpixels.) So

With just two, the wavelength specificity of the reflected light will be poor: you won't be able to make a bright green spot, merely a greenish spot.

No. The resonance (physical size) of the cavity controls the color; it doesn't depend upon how many layers are in there.

This means that if we try to set the pixel as bright as possible (all subpixels on) we'll still only get a medium grey, not white.

Yes and no (mostly no.) Look at your LCD screen. See that bright, burn-your-eyes out white capability? That comes from r,g and b spots. Meaning, each spot is only emitting 1/3 of the light that it takes to be white, or, in your concept, you're only seeing 1/3 as "white" as you could be (well, not exactly, since our eyes are nonlinear between red, green and blue, but anyway...) Still makes for a nice white. Bottom line: You don't have to reflect every photon to make a decent white. And in fact, paper reflects a lot of them at angles that don't hit your eyes, so you're not getting them all there, either. The "brightness" of the white here will depend on how wide the reflected photons spread on the way back out of the cells. Or to look at it another way, if the light reflection angle is 1/3 of the light capture angle, it'll seem perfectly white to you. The RGB nature of them isn't really the limiting factor.

each subpixel is either on or off, so each pixel can only display 8 colours.

No. Each pixel holds many elements. So the color of the pixel doesn't depend upon its neighbors.

> Look at your LCD screen. See that bright, burn-your-eyes out white capability?

Ever looked at the naked backlight? THAT is burn your eyes out white. More than half is lost to the polarizer, then more than two thirds of what remains gets lost to the color filtering. That is why even a LED backlit LCD display draws so much fracking current if it is very large. Incandescent bulbs are about as power efficient . That is why we so need an alternative if we ever hope to have portable electronics that aren

You might be right, but I'm not sure. This isn't like ink, where you can put two inks on the same place and have each subtract different colours. However, the point I'm trying to make works equally well if it is a CMY(K) colour scheme. The colour response will not be highly specific, so you won't be able to display pure colours.

It's made of tiny monochromatic mirrors that reflect or black out specific colors. It's relies on the number of mirrors per pixel sub-color to determine color intensity. While I suspect they are grouping the sub-colors per pixel right next to each other if they didn't... if every sub-pixel on this display was more or less a group of RGB each... (not likely since humans are more sensitive to certain colors) then the display would be capable or variable resolution. More resolution the closer you get to the pure RGB colors or black and white. So text on the screen can potentially be at a higher resolution while colors pictures appear at lower resolutions. This is such an advantage I suspect the research is focused on interleaved color manufacturing. While the colors on the screen won't be perfect RGB they will be a balanced matrix of colors. Addressing is the only technical challenge which would mean three different color address buses for three different screen colors. One color, I think blue being a reduced resolution for a smaller palette. That's a lot info to be transmitted but fortunately the display is it's own memory.

So to sum it up pictures at normal resolution, black/white text at 1000 times the resolution and nominal color text at 100 times the resolution.

This is great! I keep a Sony Reader, since it accepts SD cards, loaded with survival manuals, medical books, car/motorcycle repair manuals, only problem is most of the files are in PDF format, which the device isn't too great at displaying. Combine this screen in a device with large storage and battery, solar charging option and I'm all set Unless Ron Paul continues his trend, he's in second in Iowa, then I'll have no need for such a thing.

Oh wow. A techno survivalist nutjob. Here on Slashdot.

Sorry guy, the Aliens have already contacted the Illuminati. NO digital devices will be allowed to the masses. Not even Ron Paul can save us now.

Yeah. Anybody paying attention over the last few decades should realize we don't have disasters any more. We've completely eliminated the problem of cars breaking down, and there is no political turmoil of any relevance.

Bah. Keep in mind that every ounce you waste on your tech gadgets is one less round for your gun. And the guy who didn't skim rounds on his gun will eventually come by and take your Sony Reader from your cold, dead hands.

I'd be a lot more inclined to take Ron Paul and his advocates seriously if the advocates were a lot more realistic about both his potential and his intentions. In the best case scenario, he would be extremely limited in terms of implementing the positive changes he's proposed, and he would also be forced to clarify vaguely positive-sounding ideas into coherent policy that would be, well, problematical.

That's putting aside serious inconsistencies and problems in his platform and political approach.

Considering the vast majority of people are perfectly happy with 1920x1080 on a 50" screen, I doubt people will really care much if their 10" screen is any higher than that.

The BIGGEST complaint/problem with smartphones today is the lower battery life. If I could choose between doubling the resolution on my phone and doubling the battery life, I would choose the battery life in a heartbeat.

Not sure what you're trying to say. The point was that iPad currently has a resolution of 1024x768, and apps written for it use that to lay out their UI properly. If some future version of iPad has a different resolution, they'll need to do something to adapt existing apps that are not updated to be aware of it - the easiest is to just upscale them by two, as they did with iPhone: 320x480 -> 960x480. So, for iPad, they'll need 2048x1536. Upscaling by a fractional amount, like 1.5, would distort any bitma

he is trying to say that you could render the old apps in the old resolution and just scale that to whatever resolution. it's something that's actually been done on some mobile platforms - as long as resolution jump is high enough and the ratio is roughly the same(to 10-20% variation) then it wouldn't really matter that much.

but that's actually way too complicated for apple engineers, I suppose.

Upscaling by a fractional amount, like 1.5, would distort any bitmaps the app could be using.

True at low resolutions, but as the resolution and DPI increase, the distortions this causes are much less noticeable. This may not be a problem scaling from, say, 1024 to 1536. Individual pixels aren't as noticeable.

> The BIGGEST complaint/problem with smartphones today is the lower battery life.

And it's a problem that could be 100% solved if the damn manufacturers would just make the phones a millimeter or so thicker, and give them 3000mAH+ batteries instead of wimpy 1500-1800mAH batteries.The whole reason Android phones with extended batteries end up with a pregnant hump on the back is because the battery's volume has to fit within the footprint of the OEM battery. If they went back to circuit board designs that f

Battery life is good for mobile devices; but Apple pushing for retina displays in all circumstances means that we can avoid situations like this [xkcd.com] on all devices. Combine both of these with thin + flexible display research, and in maybe as little as 5 years time we will have invented something that can compete with paper \o/